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When Howard Fishman signs on for a gig, the people who attend rarely know what kind of a show they're going to see. Sometimes, Fishman doesn't even know.

That's what happens when you front several different bands -- or "projects" as Fishman calls them.

"Within each project, the band personnel can change from gig to gig depending on whose available," Fishman said in a recent phone interview from his New York City home. "I kind of have a collective of musicians who play with me depending on whose available and what I'm doing.

"There's a jazz quartet; there's a New Orleans brass band; there's my own original music, which is a little more gritty and more in the pop-rock vein; I have a song cycle I do about a trip through Eastern Europe that I do with a small orchestra.

"An artistic comrade of mine told me a long time ago to bite off more than you can chew, because it makes you rise to the occasion and that is was I tend to do. It's a crazy game to play, but I never get bored."

For his show Friday night, Sept. 14, at the Bijou Theatre in Bridgeport, Fishman said the audience can expect to see a little of all facets of his music.

"It will be the standard combination of horns and strings," he said. "We'll be doing a pretty big mix of my various things; whatever feels best that day."

That Fishman, who grew up in West Hartford, is a professional musician can almost be considered a happy accident. He went to college to study theater and only started concentrating on music while living in New Orleans.

"I didn't play music while I was growing up," he said. "It really started after college when I moved to New Orleans and spent a few years down there. That's really where my music career started and that city had a pretty profound influence on me.

"The quality of musicianship down there is just incredible. The best musicians you've never heard of are playing down there every night. It's an amazing place for music.

"And it was really intimidating for me and I think that's why it was good for me because it was really jumping into the deep end. ... I had a lot of work to do to prove that I had the right to pick up a guitar and sing and play music down there. It was good way for me to cut my teeth and kind of prove myself."

But it was still a life in the theater that brought Fishman back to the Northeast, with music relegated to being something he did on the side.

"I started directing plays on the Lower East Side and I was playing music is the subways for fun," he said. "I got a little band together and I brought them in to do some music for a play that I was directing and there were some well-connected people in the audience.

"And in a real Cinderella story, I was offered a two-week stint at the now-defunct Algonquin Oak Room. I was playing mostly vintage jazz, standards from the '20s and '30s, every night for people with lots of money. The two weeks turned into nine months, the New York media came and wrote about me, and all of a sudden I had a music career.

"I do a lot of other things than making music, but music is how I make my living. It's crazy, but that is the truth."

A few years back, Fishman went into the recording studio, and when he was done, he had enough material for three albums with a few leftovers.

"I hadn't been in the recording studio in three or four years, so I had a backlog of material," he said. "I didn't go in with the idea that I would record three albums. I just knew had a lot of songs and figured, `Well, we'll just start recording and see what happens.' We recorded close to 50 songs, and out of those we picked the best three records worth."

Fishman is putting together a new album comprised of songs that didn't make the cut from those sessions and others.

"They weren't left off because they weren't any good, but just because I have this superstition about 13 songs," he said. "All of my records have 13 songs on them. It's just a superstition of mine. There are a lot of things that got left on the cutting-room floor over the years."

The new record is to be called "Uncollected Stories," and, yes, it will have 13 songs.